Ötzi the Iceman's DNA Reveals a Living Relative 5k Years Later

https://blog.familytreedna.com/otzi-the-iceman-dna/

Comments

kitdMar 28, 2026, 10:39 PM
There's a similar story about a modern relative of Cheddar Man, this one going back 10000 years. Even more incredibly, the modern relative lives just down the road from where the ancient ancestor was found.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-family-link-that-reac...

rich_sashaMar 29, 2026, 4:59 AM
Reading the article, it seems a little crazy. They extracted the DNA, then tested... 20 people locally, and found a match???

It either means there are lots and lots of descendants, a bit like with Genghis Khan, or it's a fluke of galactic proportions.

Still, cool story!

vkouMar 28, 2026, 10:45 PM
That man is a direct descendant. The man in the article is not.
plz_throwMar 29, 2026, 9:17 AM
That man 'CAN' be a dirct descendant, the man in the article 'CAN' also be a direct descendant but you can not say it definitely. If your mother has children with another man, her grandchildren in that lineage will have the same maternal lineage as you, but that does not make them your descendants.
netsharcMar 28, 2026, 10:58 PM
Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it.

Edit: ah, it helps to read the press release properly, the research was done by by this company, so it makes sense that they're the primary source and that the marketing manager (and probably AI) wrote the article. I retract the accusation I've made below.

Digging into it further, googling "ötzi heddi abbad" I just find Dead Internet results leading back to this -- dare I say it -- hallucinated article. The image caption refers to "Augustin Ochsenreiter" but it seems he's just a general Ötzi researcher and his name is mentioned for the image credit.

This article from a German news service (I can trust this more than FamilyTreeDNA's marketing specialist) mentions that Ötzi has many relatives in Europe, but from the father's lineage: https://www.dw.com/de/viele-europ%C3%A4er-sind-mit-%C3%B6tzi...

alephnerdMar 28, 2026, 11:44 PM
> use AI to write this article

While I understand you retracted your assumption that someone used AI to write their response, I feel the increasingly gratuitous leveling of "AI Ghostwriting" accusations is detrimental to HN and writing as a whole - plenty of humans can write write in cohesive passive tense (and in fact, plenty of us who did really well in our writing classes do so), and more critically, if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI?

And more fundamentally, ghostwriting has been the norm for decades, and something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.

netsharcMar 29, 2026, 7:02 AM
I'm still accusing her of using AI.

And to AI-speak it: It's not the fact that she's using a computer I dislike. It's the fact that this paragraph structure is now overused and is aggravating.

broken-kebabMar 29, 2026, 1:10 AM
Quality of writing matters cause it affects the comfort of reading. Slop remains slop even if the argument it holds is ok. Like here for example one question is posed and answered twice within two paragraphs distance. It reads weird, and I wouldn't expect it from a human.
ninjagooMar 29, 2026, 1:35 AM
> Slop remains slop even if the argument it holds is ok

This sounds more like a religious argument than a logical one, tbh

At what point does it turn into a cult?

broken-kebabMar 29, 2026, 8:38 AM
Dunno, I made a concrete point which you ignored.
bediger4000Mar 29, 2026, 12:29 AM
I feel like it's appropriate to call out slopstyle articles. Truthful or not, slopstyle should be discouraged, same as Linkedinfluencer style should be discouraged. Neither style encourages succint communication.
alephnerdMar 29, 2026, 12:47 AM
How do people define what is slop and what isn't?
OrangePilledMar 29, 2026, 1:37 AM
This attempt could be refined but it's a decent start:

> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either.

https://lobste.rs/c/qtolag

I don't think this post qualifies though. It's a press release, not an article from Quanta Magazine.

> [...] if the underlying thesis and argument provided by the article holds true who cares if it's written by a human or AI?

> [...] something being ghostwritten by AI or Humans makes no difference.

I don't think AI-generated writing is at that level yet. But it's getting close.

"Jimi Hendrix Was a Systems Engineer": https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer

I'm probably the only person who thinks that this was written with an LLM (Claude). The code supporting it likely was too. The people who talk about "taste" being the last defense against AI aren't wrong and I think that that topic, along with a lot of others that are essentially of a philosophical import are beyond the ambit of what most people want to discuss when they criticize AI generated content. We can only wave them off for so long.

ninjagooMar 29, 2026, 1:55 AM
> This attempt could be refined but it's a decent start:

>> [...] having a polished appearance but lacking originality. None of the points it makes are novel and it doesn't connect them in novel ways either.

I have some bad news for you. Not every human is a Mozart or an Einstein. The long tail of human output has plenty of examples of the lack of originality, from bodice-rippers and pulp paperbacks and sloppy 'journalism' and 'style' magazines and articles, to carbon-copy soldiers, children in school uniforms, derivative music and film, the 5-minute Bruce Willis vehicles at the tail end of his career (though he clearly had a very good reason to make those), the cookie cutter quick-fab homes in American sub-divisions, cogs in human machines and systems of all sorts, the banality of life itself (at times) ...

OrangePilledMar 29, 2026, 4:14 AM
Taken to its extremes this rebuttal could qualify as "slop" according to the Lobste.rs comment I sourced that definition from. I'm not even trying to be snarky. This is almost an exact reiteration of a response to the linked comment.

20% of your response is just a reiteration of one that was made to the original comment that I linked to. As far as the remaining 80% goes, it's something to think about but I'm not sure what your own point is. Do you hold any of the things you named dear to you enough to not call them "slop"?

ninjagooMar 29, 2026, 7:02 AM
LOL

You must be new around here.

Since you sound sincere: "I have bad news for you" and its variant "Boy, do I have some bad news for you" are a rhetorical 2000s internet-specific stock reply format with a dry, corrective, often smug setup that means "your assumptions are wrong". More recently, it got turned into memes.

In this specific case the unstated assumption being that human output inherently bears originality, as opposed to AI output.

Proper use of that phrase is an art form, a rhetorical flourish reserved for use by those skilled in the art of the Internet put-down, and elicits a soft knowing smile in those that enjoy banter. :-) Obviously, @mjec on lobste.rs is one so skilled.

That you failed to recognize it, twice, marks you as human, and one that's not very savvy in the ways of the Internet, or able to distinguish slop from art. Any decently trained AI would have recognized it immediately.

And no, I don't hold any of those things I named dear enough to not call them slop, because, dude, I did call them slop...

LOL

This is too much fun. Sorry that it came at your expense, I guess.

I'll have to play with the 2B and 9B models to see if they fail to recognize the phrase. The bigger models all recognize it.

LOL

Now get off my lawn ;-)

PS: that burning sensation you likely feel around your ears is the subliminal recognition that, in this exchange, ai is winning out over a human, and it's not even present...

Again, apologies that my merriment is at your expense. Hopefully you don't take yourself too seriously :-)

bediger4000Mar 29, 2026, 1:05 AM
Just because you can't tell that a cup of coffee is exactly at 157F doesn't mean that you can't tell if it's too hot.

Next time I will use phrases like "long winded", "too vague", "never seems to come to the point" rather than "This article seems like AI slop".

ninjagooMar 29, 2026, 1:28 AM
> Did Courtney Eberhard, Senior Marketing Specialist at FamilyTreeDNA, use AI to write this article? It reads like it.

Maybe give it a rest, yeah?

Also, so what? If you have any evidence disputing the veracity or the content of the article, please present it.

netsharcMar 29, 2026, 7:06 AM
Don't tell me what to do or not
ninjagooMar 29, 2026, 1:40 AM
It's just amazing that DNA survived the ravages of such a long time, and even more amazing that human technology can use this to identify relatives so far apart in time or space. And then the wonders of DNA itself, what an absolutely mind-blowing bit of nature. Thinking about the structure of the universe, from quarks and fundamental particles to the large scale structures seen through telescopes, that's just wild. And then there's the ability of our mind to perceive and imagine and wonder about this .... no words.
cozzydMar 29, 2026, 4:32 AM
Caleb Williams?
vkouMar 28, 2026, 10:40 PM
The modern man was not a descendant of Otzi - he just had a common ancestor that lived two thousand years before Otzi.

If you go far enough back, I am also a relative of Otzi, through mitochondrial Eve. I can tell you this with absolute certainty without giving my DNA to some for-profit.